Thursday, July 6, 2017

Patriotism

Patriotism. What the heck is it? Why do people care?

Is it something weird in my
make-up? I don’t like team sports all
that much either, but there have been a couple of times in my life when I’ve
gotten into the spirit of it, hollering and waving my arms. It seemed harmless and unimportant. Is it?

I was patriotic when I was about ten
years old. I remember myself as a little
girl in a British school in Bangkok, valiantly defending my country against an
Australian girl who claimed that Americans were all a bunch of juvenile
delinquents. I really had no idea if it
was true or not, but felt I should stick up for the country where I was born,
the place that my parents always called home.

At that time in my life, national
identities were all just stuck onto us, like our names. They seemed a bit
random, although obscurely important. The
school furthered a tribal spirit by dividing us all into three teams – the Vikings,
Trojans and Spartans – and pitting us against each other in sports and theatre
and singing competitions. This was also
pretty random.

Now, fifty-five years later, I still don’t
think it matters particularly what country you come from. I have to go through
a lot of mental somersaults to conjure up a feeling that might be called
patriotic. Of course, this is a lot harder during the Trump Years than it was
during the Obama Years.

But lately I’ve been reading Margaret MacMillan’s
book about the tensions that led up to World War One, and there’s one truth
that springs out from its pages:
Patriotism kills people. In the
last hundred years, hundreds of millions of people have died from an excess of
patriotism. It wasn’t always their own
patriotism that killed them, either. Often
it was somebody else’s – a family member, a community, a voter, a
politician.

In the US, patriotism is linked with
religion; it’s seen as a sacred duty. It
figures that our national birthday is celebrated in July, since this is the
month with a Cancer theme. (The sun and Mars are currently in Cancer.) Cancer is the most tribal and emotional of
signs. It’s a sign of attachment –
mother to child, neighbor to neighbor, human to land. It’s about what belongs to you, and what
makes you feel that you belong.

I get plenty attached. Believe me, I am a master at attachment. I can’t throw away a pair of shoes without
feeling sad about it. And I hardly ever
throw out underwear; it’s way too intimate a relationship. And I’m very attached to my home, without
feeling any desire to own the house where we live. When I
think of the wider circles of my own life, I find attachment at every
level.

Attachment feels good. It’s comfortable, satisfying, and safe. But everything can be done to excess. And excess attachment can cause people to go
out and do all kinds of strange, unnatural things – like engaging in a fight to
the death with a stranger, so that other people can redraw the borders of the
country you live in. How does that even
make sense? When some young kid thrusts
a bayonet into some other young kid, and leaves him bleeding in some desolate
field, why does that lead to a bunch of unsmiling older men in stiff uniforms passing
around pieces of paper to sign?

So, no.
On a personal level, excess attachment is called stalking. And come to think of it, this country has been
exercising surveillance techniques over its citizens for years. Is that become the United States loves us so
much that it just has to track our every movement? It’s so attached that it can’t lose sight of
us for a moment?

There are other ways in which the US
goes too far with its attachments. Its
attachment to stuff, for example. There
has to be a lot of it, and we have to make more all the time, even though we
have no idea what to do with the enormous amount of waste we generate. We even get anxious if the economy is not
constantly growing.

There’s an interesting contradiction in
the US natal chart. There’s a stellium –
4 planets – in the sign of attachment, Cancer.
But the moon is in the most freedom-loving sign, Aquarius. So there’s a constant tension between the
tribal instincts of Cancer and the more objective and enlightened ideas of Aquarius.

We see this embodied in the work of the people
who wrote those first documents, back in the day when this country was a
fledgling enterprise. There were some
radical notions there – a division of powers, a separation of church and state,
a process by which laws can be changed – and these things are still helpful
today.

At the same time, those early citizens
were pretty damn possessive. They took possession
of all sorts of things that the native people considered part of the public
domain – mountains, rivers, forests. Nothing
was sacred, everything could be owned, and thus, defiled. Even people could be owned, and so millions
of human beings were stolen, shipped across the water, and completely controlled. (Or at least, complete control was attempted.) We can look back and see how sick this was,
how unnatural from every viewpoint.

But another word for excessive
attachment is addiction. We clutch at
whatever makes us feel safe, even if we squeeze it so hard that we kill
it. And it happens over and over – until
the earth shifts.

This month, the Cancer planets are
challenged by Pluto, the planet of power, as it moves through the earth sign Capricorn,
the driest and most unemotional sign in the zodiac. This echoes the only opposition in the US
natal chart, a Cancer/Capricorn opposition involving Pluto. Pluto gets at the deep stuff, the underlying
fears, resentments, desires and angers. It
pushes towards transformation.

In the history of the US, this manifests
as a repeating cycle of addictions clashing with reality. As an attachment becomes more and more
obsessive, and sicker and sicker, there comes a time when it can no longer be supported
by the population. There are always some
who resisted the hypnosis from the beginning, and these are the ones who rise
up first. The combination of an
alternate vision and a clearly toxic attachment adds up to change. But often there are those who hold on to the
old ways with their fingernails, even as the earth shakes and swallows
them.

So yes, July will hold some changes that
are in line with this evolutionary process.
It definitely won’t be over; there’s
still a long road to walk. And let’s see
what happens when the U.S. hits its Pluto return, about five years down the
road. My sense is that we’re learning
something now which we'll need to know then.
Perhaps it’s about the Resistance.
Perhaps it’s about world diplomacy. Perhaps it’s some technology that will
mitigate the effects of climate change. Perhaps
we will only be able to implement this technology if we can work together.

Whatever happens then, and wherever we
end up, there will be a lot to let go of.
Let go of fear first though.
There’s very little we’re attached to that we really need. And the sooner patriotism is thrown
overboard, the better.